Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Morris Zimmerman

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings blog sponsors Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. Tonight I decided to take the challenge and it led me to a person I'd not really researched before.

Randy set the rules of engagement:

1) We're going to do a bit of Semi-Random Research tonight...
2) Go to you family tree database of choice and determine who the very last person on your list of names is.
3) What do you know about this person based on your research? It's OK to do more if you need to - in fact, it's encouraged!
4) How are you related to this person, and why is s/he in your family tree?
5) Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blogpost, or in a Facebook post or Google+ Stream post.

Results

2. My database of choice is Reunion software, a Mac program. I looked on my people index and noted that the very last person was a living individual. So, I adjusted the rules a bit (hey, who's gonna know?!!?) and moved back to the next one I could find who was dearly departed: Morris Zimmerman (number 632 in my database of more than 1100).

3. I actually knew little about Morris when I started. I was able to use Ancestry to locate the family in the 1920, 1910 and 1900 US federal Census population schedules and the New York State Census for 1925 an 1915. I could not find the family in the 1905 NY State Census on FamilySearch.

Morris was born about 1863 in the Russian Empire. He married Anna Fine and had three children in the old country: Solomon, Joseph and Jennie (?). They emigrated (likely) in 1888, settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and had four more children: Henry, Sigmund (or Sidney), Abraham and Isaac. It does not appear that Jennie or Isaac lived to adulthood. Anna appears to have passed away between 1920 and 1925.

4. Morris is on my family tree because he was the father of Abraham Zimmerman who married my great aunt Jeanette Morris Zimmerman (my paternal grandmother's sister).  I first learned about him on Abraham and Jean's marriage certificate from 1927.

5. Here 'tis! See items 2-4.

Morris likely naturalized in 1899, but there is not enough information on the record for me to be sure the record I located on Fold3.com is correct. I can easily fill in some of the blanks online at another time with checks for WWI and WWII military draft registrations for Morris and Annie's sons. Further research could include checking the indices on ItalianGen for New York City births, deaths and marriages - although my initial look-sees did not come up with any easy answers due to the fact that Zimmerman is a fairly common name (i.e., I'd have to order the records and see if they are really for the correct people). 

Thanks, Randy. This was definitely Genea-Musing. Think I'll share this information with  Morris' great granddaughters.